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Riveting Netflix Michael Jordan documentary exceeds all expectations – Toronto Sun

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A lot of people became basketball fans during the Toronto Raptors’ stirring run to the NBA title last year. If you’re one of them, you’re likely missing hoops quite a bit right now. Netflix is about to start filling some of that void, and whether you’re a long-time basketball junkie, or a reality show fan, there’s a lot to be excited about. That’s because more than 20 years after behind-the-scenes footage was shot of Michael Jordan’s final season and championship with the Chicago Bulls, the resulting documentary is finally seeing the light of day.

A co-production of ESPN Films and Netflix, the 10-part The Last Dance was moved up from a planned June unveiling to this Sunday in the U.S. and Monday in Canada. Episodes will hit Netflix in this country two at a time, starting on Monday, until the final two go live on May 18.

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The series begins with a shot from behind of a seated Jordan gazing out into the horizon as a crawl sets up where things stood at at the time, Star Wars style. To recap: Jordan’s Bulls had won five titles in the last seven seasons and were preparing to try to three-peat for the second time, but everyone was wondering if this would be it for one of the greatest runs in sporting history because of various hard feelings in the front office and amongst some of the players owing primarily to jealousy and monetary disputes.

Interspersing clips of Jordan’s franchise-saving arrival in Chicago in 1984 with the man himself, fittingly addressing the United Center crowd 23 years later with five NBA championship trophies set out in front of him, The Last Dance gets rolling, immediately pulling viewers in. It never stops doing that, at least over the first four episodes that Postmedia was given to screen.

At first it’s a bit jarring to see a young, humble, low-key Jordan with hair vs. all of the intersecting later shots of the most dominant player in NBA history doing his thing, along with the reflections of the current business titan, now in his late fifties.

Unlike the VHS tapes and DVDs of the 1980s and 90s that built up the Jordan legend, putting him in a class, as one person interviewed in the doc says, only with the likes of Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali, this work is not mere hagiography. Jordan is presented warts and all. From cruelly ripping long-time Bulls general manager Jerry Krause — the driving force of the ill-conceived desire to tear apart the team — to his face, to being relentless with his teammates during tough stretches, there’s a reason Jordan told director Jason Hehir (Andre the Giant, The Fab Five, The ’85 Bears) that people will think he’s “a horrible guy” and won’t understand why he acted the way he did when they watch the film. “My innate personality is to win at all costs. If I have to do it myself, (I will) do it … It drives me insane when I can’t,” Jordan says years later in trying to explain his mindset and actions. His mother, Deloris, and brother, Ronnie, also provide some insight into where he got those traits from, based on his upbringing.

And that’s the true triumph of the series. Incredibly, for once, Jordan, one of the most famous and scrutinized people on the planet for over 35 years now, is presented as human. When can you ever recall Jordan being revealed as such? Not just as a myth, but as a living, breathing, person. It’s impossible not to chuckle when Jordan is handed a tablet showing a video of his mother reading a letter a teenaged Jordan wrote to her while at college at North Carolina. In it, Jordan, who is now a billionaire and owns the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets, says he’s down to his last $20, so could use a handout, along with some stamps from his parents. “And sorry about the phone bill,” Jordan adds. In another moment Jordan laughs and tells a story when asked about the cocaine problems of some of his rookie season teammates.

While sports provides much of the background of the journey, there’s so much more here. There are Survivor and Big Brother elements owing to the rare, up close and personal footage, which was simply not done at the time. Jordan commissioned the crew when it became clear that 1997-98 would be the end of a remarkable era and head coach Phil Jackson and ownership were on board. What they revealed was the fractious nature of the organization at the time. All of the palace intrigue is there. Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf tries to explain the still baffling reasoning behind tearing down the iconic group and starting a rebuild, reminding that the Bulls nearly made the mistake of doing so a year earlier, following the fifth title. It’s something to see Jordan openly challenging management and ownership while up on a dais right after winning number five. That same night, Jordan’s running mate Scottie Pippen, also featured heavily throughout, particularly in Episode 2, holds nothing back in talking about being underpaid and disrespected by the Bulls. Jordan also is there saying he won’t play for another coach if Jackson is pushed out by Krause, which basically forced ownership’s hand in giving Jackson one more year. Jackson called that final season “The Last Dance.”

Jordan talked about how angry the idea of not trying to win again made him.

“We’re entitled to defend what we have until we lose it.” Then he scoffed at the idea of rebuilding and buried the Chicago Cubs by saying they’d been rebuilding for 42 years, took a shot at ownership by saying they should have respect for the people who made them profitable — an open response to Krause saying organizations win championships, not players — which got under Jordan’s skin. Krause would unsuccessfully try to clear up the controversial quote, by saying he said players and coaches alone don’t win championships.

“We felt like we were the greatest team ever,” Pippen says at one point, making it clear he still doesn’t understand why some were so eager to move on.

And, oh yes, there’s plenty of Dennis Rodman, the most unique athlete we’ve ever seen, as well as thoughts from the likes of Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas, James Worthy, Jordan’s Canadian Bulls teammate Bill Wennington (who provides strong insight throughout), former Raptor and close Jordan pal Charles Oakley (who is memorably shown roughhousing with an overly confident rookie Pippen). Bill Clinton, a fellow Arkansas native, even appears to discuss seeing Pippen play for the first time when Clinton was still governor of that state.

The late David Stern and Krause and even Chicago native Barack Obama, who talks about not being able to afford a ticket in Jordan’s early years, when the hoops icon had saved the franchise and nearly tripled their attendance, all provide some historical context.

Jordan can’t save the world, but thanks to his foresight in hiring the camera crew and the work of so many in the ensuing decades to make The Last Dance happen, he and his friends and foes can at least brighten up our days a little bit for the next few weeks.

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Soccer legend Christine Sinclair says goodbye in Vancouver |

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Christine Sinclair scored one final goal at B.C. Place, helping the Portland Thorns to a 6-0 victory over the Whitecaps Girls Elite team. The soccer legend has announced she’ll retire from professional soccer at the end of the National Women’s Soccer League season. (Oct. 16, 2024)

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A German in charge of England? Nationality matters less than it used to in international soccer

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The question was inevitable.

At his first news conference as England’s newly appointed head coach, Thomas Tuchel – a German – was asked on Wednesday what message he had for fans who would have preferred an Englishman in charge of their beloved national team.

“I’m sorry, I just have a German passport,” he said, laughing, and went on to profess his love for English football and the country itself. “I will do everything to show respect to this role and to this country.”

The soccer rivalry between England and Germany runs deep and it’s likely Tuchel’s passport will be used against him if he doesn’t deliver results for a nation that hasn’t lifted a men’s trophy since 1966. But his appointment as England’s third foreign coach shows that, increasingly, even the top countries in the sport are abandoning the long-held belief that the national team must be led by one of their own.

Four of the top nine teams in the FIFA world rankings now have foreign coaches. Even in Germany, a four-time World Cup winner which has never had a foreign coach, candidates such as Dutchman Louis van Gaal and Austrian Oliver Glasner were considered serious contenders for the top job before the country’s soccer federation last year settled on Julian Nagelsmann, who is German.

“The coaching methods are universal and there for everyone to apply,” said German soccer researcher and author Christoph Wagner, whose recent book “Crossing the Line?” historically addresses Anglo-German rivalry. “It’s more the personality that counts and not the nationality. You could be a great coach, and work with a group of players who aren’t perceptive enough to get your methods.”

Not everyone agrees.

English soccer author and journalist Jonathan Wilson said it was “an admission of failure” for a major soccer nation to have a coach from a different country.

“Personally, I think it should be the best of one country versus the best of another country, and that would probably extend to coaches as well as players,” said Wilson, whose books include “Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics.”

“To say we can’t find anyone in our country who is good enough to coach our players,” he said, “I think there is something slightly embarrassing, slightly distasteful about that.”

That sentiment was echoed by British tabloid The Daily Mail, which reported on Tuchel’s appointment with the provocative headline “A Dark Day for England.”

While foreign coaches are often found in smaller countries and those further down the world rankings, they are still a rarity among the traditional powers of the game. Italy, another four-time world champion, has only had Italians in charge. All of Spain’s coaches in its modern-day history have been Spanish nationals. Five-time World Cup winner Brazil has had only Brazilians in charge since 1965, and two-time world champion France only Frenchmen since 1975.

And it remains the case that every World Cup-winning team, since the first tournament in 1930, has been coached by a native of that country. The situation is similar for the women’s World Cup, which has never been won by a team with a foreign coach, though Jill Ellis, who led the U.S. to two trophies, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in England.

Some coaches have made a career out of jumping from one national team to the next. Lars Lagerbäck, 76, coached his native Sweden between 2000-09 and went on to lead the national teams of Nigeria, Iceland and Norway.

“I couldn’t say I felt any big difference,” Lagerbäck told The Associated Press. “I felt they were my teams and the people’s teams.”

For Lagerbäck, the obvious disadvantages of coaching a foreign country were any language difficulties and having to adapt to a new culture, which he particularly felt during his brief time with Nigeria in 2010 when he led the African country at the World Cup.

Otherwise, he said, “it depends on the results” — and Lagerbäck is remembered with fondness in Iceland, especially, after leading the country to Euro 2016 for its first ever international tournament, where it knocked out England in the round of 16.

Lagerbäck pointed to the strong education and sheer number of coaches available in soccer powers like Spain and Italy to explain why they haven’t needed to turn to an overseas coach. At this year’s European Championship, five of the coaches were from Italy and the winning coach was Luis de la Fuente, who was promoted to Spain’s senior team after being in charge of the youth teams.

Portugal for the first time looked outside its own borders or Brazil, with which it has historical ties, when it appointed Spaniard Roberto Martinez as national team coach last year. Also last year, Brazil tried — and ultimately failed — to court Real Madrid’s Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti, with Brazilian soccer federation president Ednaldo Rodrigues saying: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a foreigner or a Brazilian, there’s no prejudice about the nationality.”

The United States has had a long list of foreign coaches before Mauricio Pochettino, the Argentine former Chelsea manager who took over as the men’s head coach this year.

The English Football Association certainly had no qualms making Tuchel the national team’s third foreign-born coach, after Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson (2001-06) and Italian Fabio Capello (2008-12), simply believing he was the best available coach on the market.

Unlike Eriksson and Capello, Tuchel at least had previous experience of working in English soccer — he won the Champions League in an 18-month spell with Chelsea — and he also speaks better English.

That won’t satisfy all the nay-sayers, though.

“Hopefully I can convince them and show them and prove to them that I’m proud to be the English manager,” Tuchel said.

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AP Sports Writer Jerome Pugmire in Paris contributed to this story.

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Maple Leafs winger Bobby McMann finding game after opening-night scratch

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TORONTO – Bobby McMann watched from the press box on opening night.

Just over a week later, the Maple Leafs winger took a twirl as the first star.

McMann went from healthy scratch to unlikely offensive focal point in just eight days, putting up two goals in Toronto’s 6-2 victory over the Los Angeles Kings on Wednesday.

The odd man out at the Bell Centre against the Montreal Canadiens, he’s slowly earning the trust of first-year head coach Craig Berube.

“There’s a lot of good players on this team,” McMann said of his reaction to sitting out Game 1. “Maybe some guys fit better in certain scenarios than others … just knowing that my opportunity would come.”

The Wainwright, Alta., product skated on the second line with William Nylander and Max Domi against Los Angeles, finishing with those two goals, three hits and a plus-3 rating in just over 14 minutes of work.

“He’s been unbelievable,” said Nylander, who’s tied with McMann for the team lead with three goals. “It’s great when a player like that comes in.”

The 28-year-old burst onto the scene last February when he went from projected scratch to hat-trick hero in a single day after then-captain John Tavares fell ill.

McMann would finish 2023-24 with 15 goals and 24 points in 56 games before a knee injury ruled him out of Toronto’s first-round playoff loss to the Boston Bruins.

“Any time you have success, it helps the confidence,” he said. “But I always trust the abilities and trust that they’re there whether things are going in or (I’m not) getting points. Just trying to play my game and trust that doing the little things right will pay off.”

McMann was among the Leafs’ best players against the Kings — and not just because of what he did on the scoresheet. The forward got into a scuffle with Phillip Danault in the second period before crushing Mikey Anderson with a clean hit in the third.

“He’s a power forward,” Berube said. “That’s how he should think the game, night in and night out, as being a power forward with his skating and his size. He doesn’t have to complicate the game.”

Leafs goaltender Anthony Stolarz knew nothing about McMann before joining Toronto in free agency over the summer.

“Great two-way player,” said the netminder. “Extremely physical and moves really well, has a good shot. He’s a key player for us in our depth. I was really happy for him to get those two goals.

“Works his butt off.”

ON TARGET

Leafs captain Auston Matthews, who scored 69 times last season, ripped his first goal of 2024-25 after going without a point through the first three games.

“It’s not going to go in every night,” said Matthews, who added two assists against the Kings. “It’s good to see one fall … a little bit of the weight lifted off your shoulders.”

WAKE-UP CALL

Berube was animated on the bench during a third-period timeout after the Kings cut a 5-0 deficit to 5-2.

“Taking care of the puck, being harder in our zone,” Matthews said of the message. “There were times in the game, early in the second, in the third period, where the momentum shifted and we needed to grab it back.”

PATCHES SITS

Toronto winger Max Pacioretty was a healthy scratch after dressing the first three games.

“There’s no message,” Berube said of the 35-year-old’s omission. “We have extra players and not everybody can play every night. That’s the bottom line. He’s been fine when he’s played, but I’ve got to make decisions as a coach, and I’m going to make those decisions — what I think is best for the team.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

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